Triggering OpenNMS notifications when patterns occur in a log file
A common problem with OpenNMS is how to monitor a log file and trigger alerts when certain conditions are met. Let me clarify with an example: you have this mission critical app that sometimes experiences internal errors. The application keeps running and still responds to requests, but the error will slow down the system and/or delay further processing. Monitoring the process and/or network polling will obviously not be able to detect the issue and the only way is to tail the application log file and look for certain messages. The problem can usually be solved simply by forwarding the log file to OpenNMS through syslog, but what for logs generated by applications that don't speak syslog or if you don't want to configure syslog forwarding?